Every hour, my toddler would walk to the same corner of his room and press his face against the wall. At first, I convinced myself it was just a phase. Kids do odd things all the time. But the day my son finally said something about it, everything shifted.

I bolted up the basement stairs, my boots hammering against the wooden steps.

"Ray!" I yelled, reaching the second floor. "Lock the front door! Now!"

Ray met me in the hallway, looking bewildered but instantly reacting to the terror in my voice. He ran down to the front door and threw the deadbolt, while I sprinted up the fold-down stairs leading to the attic.

The attic was hot, dusty, and smelled of dry cedar. I scrambled through piles of cardboard boxes until I found the blue metal lockbox that belonged to my late wife.

I didn't bother looking for the key. I grabbed a claw hammer from Ray’s toolbox and smashed the brass latch until it snapped open.

Inside were three leather journals, a collection of printed medical spreadsheets, and a small, silver USB drive labeled with a single word in Clara’s neat handwriting: ETHAN.

My hands shook as I pulled out the top journal. I flipped to the last entry, dated four days before she died in the hospital.

If anything happens to me, I know Arthur will come looking for the data. I’ve encrypted the trial logs on the silver drive. The physical encryption key—the hard drive ledger—is hidden where no one will ever look. I put it inside the old wall safe behind the plaster in the nursery. I set the combination to Ethan’s birthdate. If Arthur finds out what I’ve done, he’ll try to claim Ethan’s trust.

Arthur Vance. My uncle.

He was the majority owner of Aegis Dynamics—and the man who had offered to pay off my mortgage after Clara died under the guise of "family charity." He was the one who had recommended the temporary nanny agency to me in the first place.

He hadn't been helping me out of grief. He had been monitoring my home, trying to locate the hard data Clara had stolen before she died. The nanny had found the safe three months ago using a stud finder, but she couldn't open the steel door without the combination.

So they had installed a speaker feed behind the mesh, playing recorded snippets of Clara’s voice taken from old family videos—hoping to trigger Ethan’s memory or draw attention to the wall, watching through the baby monitor to see if I would lead them to the combination.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

The sound wasn't coming from a ghost. It was the sound of a directional acoustic transducer—a device used to vibrate metal plates from a distance to create localized sound waves.

A loud, heavy knock suddenly echoed through the house from the front porch downstairs.